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Then and Now
Note by Richard Greeman
I originally wrote this rather crude attempt at describing a future ecotopian world ten years ago in the traditional form of a fictional dream. Aware of its inadequacies and believing in collective creation, I posted it on a WIKI and invited some friends to join in elaborating it; however this project never really got off the ground. Today, I am proposing it again, somewhat revised and updated, as a kind of outline or canvas which we Future Historians can use as a base for creating our own version of a possible ‘better world.’ It is at best a bare-bones first draft, but it will probably be easier for us to change, elaborate, even transform it, than starting from scratch.
So go to it, comrades and colleagues! Refer to these instructions to edit or add pages to this Wiki.
I have of course had to replace the traditional narrative frame of the time-traveler’s first-hand account of a visit to Ecotopia, to that of Future Historians looking backward from 2117 to 2017, and this in itself has proven to be a great improvement. It inspired me to propose a new title, “Then and Now,” and to use our historical perspective as Future Historians to contrast the conditions of 2017 to those of ‘today’ in 2117. This method brings out one of the two main functions of utopian fiction, which along with proposing an alternative world, provides an ironic critique of the present state of affairs. Thus, Thomas More’s 1515 “Utopia” famously begins with a description of Tudor England as a “barbarous land where “sheep eat men” because, through legal enclosures, thousands of peasants are being driven off their farms to make room for the profitable grazing of sheep, only to be hanged as thieves ane vagabonds if they steal food to survive.
Similarly, on the same topic of agriculture, we can describe the world of 2017 as a place where peasants are driven off the land to graze cattle for McDonald burgers, where peasants are legally deprived of the right to plant their own seeds and forced to buy them from global monopolies like Montsanto, where peasants routinely commit suicide to escape the overwhelming burdon of debt, where traditional subsistance farmers are ruined by the dumping of huge amounts of cheap industrially-produced corn into local markets, where vast factory-farms, owned by banks and conglomerates, transform inputs of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers and pesticides into mega-tons of uniformly tastless produce designed to attract the eye and to remain salable for weeks after harvesting, where agricultural products are transported thousands of miles to markets at a huge cost in carbon pollution, where monopolistic distribution chains pay farmers ridiculously low prices for their produce and suck up enormous profits overcharging custormers, where nearly half of this excess produce goes to waste while famines rage across half the world, where food-riots break out periodically, and where the extraction of petroleum for industrial agriculture and the clear-cutting of forests for profitable luxury crops like palm-oil contribute massively to global warming and climate catastrophe.
We Future Historians then present the world of 2117 as a place where vast desert lands have been reclaimed through irrigation and the revival of long-dormant native seeds, where new forests have been planted to halt erosion, prevent desertification, and absorb CO2 while releasing oxygen, where animal and vegetable waste matter is recycled as nature fertilizer, where permaculture techniques have replaced chemical fertilizers and pesticides, where small farmers flourish and provide fresh, healthy, seasonal produce to local markets which also serve to unite communities, etc, etc. All this is not only possible, it is already actually happening in the intersistes of capitalist society, visible elements of the new world growing within the old.
NB: I just wrote this riff on agriculture off the top of my head in a few minutes, and I’m by no means a specialist! I assume the same “Then and Now” techniques could be applied to the subjects of energy (e.g. the Schwartzmans’ ‘Solar Communism,’), transportation, democracy, and most of the other topics we will be studying.
